


A Gift of History

by LadyRem



Series: History in Art [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, M/M, Short One Shot, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 02:04:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19843288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyRem/pseuds/LadyRem
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley receive a gift that brings back long ago memories. A continuation to "Faces Through Time," in which an art historian finds a series of familiar faces in art stretching back through history. This can be read as a stand-alone, however.





	A Gift of History

What Carmen didn’t know --what Carmen would never know-- was just how close they had come to the end of the world. A real, true end. That weekend she had been preparing for her thesis defense the following Monday, oblivious to all signs of the apocalypse, locked away in her small London flat for four days straight while she wavered between frustrated apathy and sheer panic fueled by take-away curry and an unhealthy number of energy drinks. And when the day came, she spent a long, grueling session fielding questions about her theory on the religious significance of the blending of heavenly love and earthly eroticism in Caravaggio’s depictions of angels against a panel of very skeptic professors. It had been tiring, it had been terrifying, but she had left the building triumphant, feeling like it was the first day of the rest of her life.

She didn’t know how right she was.

It wasn’t until a few years later that the idea for the project struck her while packing up her small flat in anticipation for a move to Oxford. Buried under a pile of old gift bags, decorative candles, some unused china, and a particularly gaudy duvet cover gifted to her by a well-meaning but thoroughly colorblind uncle was a box filled with her early graduate work. She had planned to toss it out wholesale, but a paper had slipped from a folder at the top of the box, a photocopy of a painting from an excavated wall in Pompeii. Carmen dug through the box then, a wave of nostalgia and surprise hitting her all at once. Somehow, in the intervening years, Carmen had entirely forgotten about her “crackpot” theory, and the strange encounter she’d had with the men in the bookshop. It was like the memory, and everything around it, had been gently packed away in wool and placed in the back closet of her mind, much like the box of papers had been. But it all came flooding back when she brought it into the light again.

It would take a few months of digging, and the help of more than a few contacts, but the day the project was done, Carmen stood in her office at Oxford and beamed at the object in her hands. Then, ever so carefully, she wrapped it up in brown paper, wrote an address neatly on the front, and walked it down to the post.

* * *

When Crowley came in, he was covered in dust. It wouldn’t last long – there was no way in any plane of existence that he would let another living being see him look so pastoral—but for a moment he stood in the doorway, limed in the light of the late afternoon sun, the halo of dust-filled air giving him a golden aura. He had spent the afternoon out in the garden, scaring off mice and other pests that threatened Azirpahale’s tomatoes, and occasionally making a snack of it. As the air began to shift toward evening’s coolness, he decided it was a good time to head inside and see what the angel was up to.

He had been expecting to find Aziraphale at the dining room table, tea at the ready, his own cup cradled in a plump, well-manicured hand. What he hadn’t expected was the large paper-wrapped parcel on the table in front of him.

“What’s that?” Crowley asked. He hovered over the table and looked down at the angel.

“It’s a package,” Aziraphale replied.

“I can see that.”

“For _both of us,_ ” Aziraphale added, with a pointed look.

Crowley’s eyebrows raised a fraction.

“Oh. Is it from….” He gestured vaguely in an up-and-down motion.

“Not as far as I can tell, no,” Aziraphale said. “Seems to be just an ordinary package.”

“An ordinary package,” the demon said incredulously. “Addressed to _both of us._ ”

“Well, actually, it’s addressed to… well, um.” Aziraphale put his tea down, looking rather embarrassed. “It’s addressed to me and my… companion.”

“Your _what?”_ Crowley’s mouth gaped, and he stared at the angel for a solid five seconds before closing it and then sitting down quickly in the chair next to Aziraphale. He pulled the package toward himself with an air of offense and glared down at the carefully addressed paper. The address read _To Mr. A.Z. Fell and His Constant Companion,_ sent to the bookshop in Soho and the forwarded to their current address at the cottage on the South Downs. Crowley stared at it intently, and for a moment forgot to breathe.

“Well, go on,” Aziraphale said.

“What?” Crowley asked, distracted.

“Open it,” the angel urged. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

Crowley looked up at him, and then down at the package.

“Yes, right. Sure. Why not?”

He tore the paper wrapping off the package with an expression of dread and distrust, which quickly turned into confusion.

Inside was a book. It was large, wider than it was tall, about an inch thick with a blue cloth binding. There was no title. Crowley turned it over in his hand, one eyebrow raised.

“It’s a book,” he said.

Aziraphale gave a small smile.

“Yes, I can see that.”

Crowley made a face at him and handed the book over.

“I don’t think they meant this for me then,” he said dismissively. Aziraphale opened the cover of the book gently and read the first page. His lips pursed in thought.

“Don’t be too sure about that,” he said quietly. Crowley tilted his head, and then scooted his chair closer to Aziraphale until they were shoulder to shoulder, and he could see inside the book. He draped an arm casually around the back of the angel’s chair and leaned in.

The paper was smooth and glossy looking, like magazine paper instead of paperback pages. What should have been the title was, instead, a short inscription, printed in simple black lettering on an otherwise empty page. It read: 

> _To Mr. Fell and His Companion,_
> 
> _May it bring you many good memories._
> 
> _Sincerely,  
>  a Friend_

“A friend? Who would—” Crowley began to ask, but Aziraphale ignored him and turned the page.

The first image was a photo of an old Greek vase. The image depicted a gathering, with a crowd facing a man at the center. The photo, however, was focused on a pair of figures that stood at the back, one in dark robes with long curling hair, the other in light robes, the face a distinctly familiar profile. On the opposite page, another photo, this time an old painting on a wall. The figures sat together, one drinking while the other ate.

Aziraphale turned the page. A bust, this time, with strange eyes and a familiar frown. Next to it a photo of a different bust, all tight wild curls and deep smile lines. The next page, a beautiful illustration from an illuminated manuscript, featuring the pair again, one with long red hair in blue robes, the other in a cream-colored tunic and brown hose beside them.

Aziraphale turned the pages slowly, deliberately, while Crowley gaped at the book over his shoulder. The demon had taken off his sunglasses, and his yellow eyes stared with disbelief as the pages turned before him.

“That’s… that’s _us,_ ” he said, finally. “It’s a book full of us.”

“That’s what it seems to be,” Aziraphale said lightly, still concentrating on the book in hand.

“But how? And who?” Crowley turned his gaze away from the pages and fixed it on the angel.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Aziraphale answered.

“Do you think it’s a human? Is it the child?” He gestured vaguely in the direction of Tadfield.

“Nooo, I don’t think so,” Aziraphale said, shaking his head. “It does say ‘a friend’, however. So it’s not entirely impossible that it might be related to that whole group. Though I had thought the majority of them would have forgotten about the whole affair by now, if just for self-preservation.”

Crowley stared at the book in silence for a few minutes, deep in some unknowable thought, and wracked very briefly by a very knowable sense of anxiety. But no, he told himself, whoever it is it’s not _them._ Hell doesn’t play silly games like this. They’ve always preferred the more… direct approach. And Crowley was fairly certain that the other side was likely the same way. He let out a breath that was half exasperation and half relief, and mentally shook himself.

“Well, whoever it is, they’ve got a good eye for art,” he said, tilting his head back with a smile.

“Oh, they do!” Aziraphale said. “Look here, at this sketch. Do you remember that day? 1503--”

“Oooh I remember that! Good old Leonardo! Wasn’t he painting that girl, that silk merchant’s wife, uhhhh whatzername—”

“Lisa.”

“Yeah, her! He spent the whole time complaining about her teeth—”

“—they were terrible, the poor thing—”

“—before he just gave up and left the mouth closed. I don’t remember him sketching us though.”

“You were sleeping in the sun out on the veranda, under one of the trees.”

“What, and you just let me sleep?” Crowley asked, only mildly indignant.

“I was enjoying lunch, and it was rather peaceful.” Aziraphale smiled fondly, a faraway look coming over him. “You were asleep under the tree on a blanket, and I’d just gotten some fresh bread and a skin of wine from down the street, and someone was practicing music nearby, and Leonardo sat on one of the steps with his sketchbook. I didn’t really think about it at the time.”

He traced the sketch of Crowley’s resting face idly, lost in thought.

“Things were very different then,” he said, so quiet that Crowley had to lean in close to hear him.

“Do you miss it?” Crowley asked softly.

Aziraphale shook his head, and the motion seemed to break him out of his thoughts. He took a deep breath and looked around the cottage with a small crooked smile, before settling his gaze on Crowley beside him.

“No,” he said firmly. “I like this much better.”

Crowley, almost in spite of himself, smiled softly back. Aziraphale looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, his face just a breath away. Crowley became keenly aware of the exact distance between their noses.

“Still,” Aziraphale said, breaking the silence and turning his head back to the book with blissful ignorance of Crowley’s increasingly red face. “This is nice.”

“Wh—uh. What is?” Crowley stumbled through the question.

“The book. We’ve never really had a history, not like this, you know? Like people do, all set down on paper, a chronicle of our lives. It’s like, well, I don’t know. It’s like—”

“A scrapbook?” Crowley offered.

Aziraphale beamed.

“Yes, exactly! A scrapbook, just for us.” The angel looked at the book fondly, holding it lovingly in his hands. Crowley bit his lip to keep himself from grinning like an idiot at the sight. With a breath and a noise halfway between a grunt and an “ahhh well”, Crowley lifted his arm off the back of Aziraphale’s chair and stood up with a stretch. Aziraphale, startled by the sudden movement, looked up at him.

“What do you want for supper, angel?” the demon asked, placing a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“You’re going to cook?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yeeeah, well, I’m just in a cooking sort of mood,” Crowley said nonchalantly. He bent down and kissed the angel on the cheek. Aziraphale grinned, and looked up at him as he pulled away, reaching a hand up from the book to the one Crowley had placed on his shoulder and giving it a squeeze.

“Oh, well then, maybe some carrot and ginger soup. I just brought in some of those Nantes I was growing, I think they’d taste delightful with—”

Crowley pulled a face that said _I’m already in over my head and I haven’t even started yet,_ and Aziraphale laughed.

“Here, I’ll help,” the angel said. “Go get that basket there…”

Outside, the sun had begun to set over the South Downs, the gentle fading light gilding the top of the rose tree that crowned the little cottage. A warm breeze lifted the leaves and tossed them gently in a sound that quickly blended into the noise of the far away waves. And inside, in their own little world, an angel and a demon made supper.

* * *

It was a cold winter’s evening in Oxford a few years later as Carmen Fernandez shuffled stiffly through the snow to her university office. Her frozen fingers fumbled numbly with the keys for a moment before she managed to get the large old wooden door open, and she threw herself into the heated room with a sigh of relief. It didn’t matter how long she lived in England, she would never get used to the biting cold. She shrugged her hat, scarf, coat, and gloves off quickly on the rack by the glowing fire and sat down with a weary thump in the high-back chair beside it.

She sat with her eyes closed and waited for her frozen limbs to soak up the warmth, and as such she didn’t notice the package on the stand beside her until a good ten minutes later, when she reached her hand over for the cup of tea she usually left there and was surprised to find a small paper wrapped box instead. She opened her eyes quickly and looked over.

A square box, roughly eight by ten inches and maybe two or three inches high, was perched on the stand beside her chair, with her name written in a beautiful cursive on the top. Carmen raised an eyebrow and picked it up, and gently shook it. It sounded like something hard and flat. Curious, Carmen carefully stripped the paper off the box and opened it.

Inside were two items. First, a small folded note on a lovely hand-made stationary in that same beautiful scrawl. It read simply: 

> _To Miss Fernandez,_
> 
> _Thank you for your gift. It brought good memories indeed._
> 
> _Yours truly,  
>  Mr. Fell & his companion_

Underneath the note was a color lithograph. Carmen gasped as she lifted it from the box into the light. The lithograph was an 19th century landscape of Berkeley Square in London. Trees dominate the skyline, and in the park below people walk along the paths with gentle smiles. In the background, young children ran between their mothers and nannies. At the center of the path in the middle of the piece, a young man grasped the hands of a young girl between them, his face staring down ardently at her own. At the fore, to the right, a pair of figures stood together, their arms linked as they walk; one a tall man with long red hair pulled back fashionably as he looked over at a shorter man, whose free hand was raised as if caught gesturing mid-sentence as he looks up at his companion. The lithograph’s title read “Lovers in Berkeley Square”.

Carmen looked down at it in shock for a few minutes, until the shock slowly gave way to amusement. She got to her feet gingerly, wincing at the electric sting of nerve endings finally warming up from the winter chill and complaining loudly about the inconvenience, and walked over to the fireplace. She placed the lithograph on the mantlepiece with a smile.

For the rest of her tenure, no one ever asked Carmen about the lithograph in her office, which was a shame. If they had, she would have gladly told them about the time that she met an angel and his lover in a small dusty bookshop in Soho, how she had sent them a gift, and how the lithograph had been sent in thanks.

But maybe it was better that they didn’t ask, really. No one would have believed her anyway.


End file.
